Literatuur ‘Vaders’
Lamb, M. (2000). The history of research on father involvement
A brief history of fatherhood:
One can discern at least three broad and widely recognized dimensions of fatherhood:
1. concerns about fatherlessness and ‘‘deadbeat dads’’ highlight the implicit equation of responsible
fatherhood with successful provisioning or bread-winning.
2. the direct interactions between fathers and children in the provision of care, discipline, coaching,
education, companionship, play, and supervision.
3. the relationships between fathers and mothers–a primary determinant of the family climate which, in
turn, affects child development and adjustment in profound ways.
Researchers and theorists have tended to restrict their focus to individual components of fatherhood, ignoring
or paying minimal attention to the interactions among multiple roles and the ways in which a broader and
more inclusive conception of fatherhood might both enrich and change our analysis and understanding. This
narrow or restrictive conception of fatherhood, rather than a more inclusive and complex portrait, reflects, in
part, the changing ways in which fatherhood has been viewed within the broader society which social scientists
shape and by which they are simultaneously shaped.
Social historians argue that much can be learned by examining letters and the literature or popular
writing during particular eras in the past. According to Pleck (1984), one can actually discern four phases or
periods over the last two centuries of American social history. In each of these, a different dominant motif
became prominent in writing to or about fathers:
1. The moral teacher or guide = father’s role was predominately defined by responsibility for moral
oversight and moral teaching. They were deemed primarily responsible for ensuring that their children
grew up with an appropriate sense of values, acquired primarily from the study of religious materials
like the Bible. Fathers assumed responsibility for the education of children, because children had to be
literate to read the Scriptures. Helping children become literate served to advance the father’s role as
moral guardian by ensuring that children were academically equipped to adopt and maintain Christian
ways. During this era, good fathers were defined as men who provided a model of good Christian living
and whose children were well versed in the Scriptures.
2. The breadwinner = Around the time of centralized industrialization fathers came to be defined largely
by their responsibility for breadwinning. This view endured from the mid-nineteenth century through
the Great Depression. This is not to say that other aspects of the father’s role, such as the presumed
responsibility for moral guardianship, had disappeared. Nor that, before industrialization,
breadwinning had been insignificant. However, prior to industrialization, mothers and fathers had
shared the responsibility of provisioning. After industrializaton, the reduction in the importance of
subsistence agriculture and home industry forced a separation between in- and out-of-home work.
With industrialization, breadwinning became the defining characteristic of fatherhood.
3. The sex-role model = the 1940s brought a new conceptualization of fatherhood, manifested primarily
in a literature focused on the inadequacy of many fathers. Breadwinning and moral guardianship
remained important, but focus shifted in the 1930s/1940s to the father’s function as a sex-role model,
especially for his sons. literature focused on the need for strong sex-role models, with many
professionals concluding that fathers were clearly not doing a good job in this regard.
4. The new nurturant father = Around the mid-1970s there was emphasized that fathers could and
should be nurturant parents who were actively involved in the day-to-day care of their children. Active
parenting was defined as the central component of fatherhood and was portrayed as the yardstick by
which ‘‘good fathers’’ might be assessed
Changing fatherhood: the social scientists’ perspective:
The systematic or scientific study of fatherhood and father-child relationships has a much shorter history than
that explored by family historians. Many historians of science identify the turn of the century as the
approximate time that the social sciences, including psychology and sociology, became differentiated from
,philosophy, biology, and medicine.
Sigmund Freud’s archetypal father was characterized by classic masculine characteristics. He was to be
psychologically strong, dominant within the family, assertive, decisive, and successful as a provider. Within
psychoanalytic theory, the father functioned primarily in the context of a motivational system in which boys
sought to identify with their fathers. The dominant concern during this era was with the extent to which
children behaved, acted, or saw themselves as being similar to their fathers. Consequently, the modal study
was one in which some aspect of the father’s masculinity, personality, more generally, was correlated with
some aspect (usually the same aspect) of the son’s personality in an effort to evaluate the degree to which
identification had been effective. The focus was thus on qualitative characteristics such as masculinity,
dominance, assertiveness, and the like.
The Second World War fostered two remarkably significant concerns within psychology. . One was the
literature on maternal deprivation, which demonstrated that children raised in orphanages or hospital settings
were seriously affected by these early rearing circumstances. Based on this Bowlby argued that the absence of
motherly love, as represented by access to the continuous care and affection of a single individual in the early
months of life, effectively doomed children to serious psycho-social disadvantage. A parallel body of literature
focused on father absence. The results suggested that children, especially boys, were irrevocably harmed when
they grew up in families without fathers, either because their fathers had been killed or were deployed away
from home for long stretches of time. Ironically, both the maternal deprivation and father absence literatures
oversimplified the relationships between traumatic events and the alleged outcomes or effects, and each
ignored the many other potential risk factors that might better explain the apparent effects.
For a variety of reasons, when psychologists turned their attention to father involvement in the late
1970s, they evinced a very narrow interest in the amount of time that fathers spent with their children. Their
perspective was narrow first because the focus was limited to amount of time involved without recognizing
differences in the quality of interaction. A second limiting factor was the focus on the components of
fatherhood that involved direct interaction, while ignoring the other ways in which fathers could make
important contributions to their children’s welfare and development (e.g. supporting financially or providing
emotional support for mothers). At minimum, however, these scientists felt they would be able to accumulate
some good ‘‘hard’’ data on at least one aspect of fatherhood. Unfortunately, as I indicate in the next section,
the first generation of researchers who attempted to determine how much time the average father spent
interacting with his children found it much more difficult than expected to obtain answers to this question
How have researchers compared levels of paternal involvement?:
Many of the studies designed to determine both how much time fathers spent with their children and what
sorts of activities occupied that time have involved small and often unrepresentative samples. Fortunately,
however, this area of research can also boast several studies involving nationally representative samples of
individuals. Given the availability of these data, it would seem easy to determine how much time the average
father spends with his children. However, dramatic and irreconcilable differences fostered intensive and
systematic efforts to understand both why the data were so unreliable and how more reliable estimates could
be obtained
How have researchers compared levels of paternal involvement?: engagement, accessibility and responsibility
One problem is that the implicit definitions of paternal involvement often vary from study to study, with
different activities being included in operational definitions. Therefore it is necessary to group the studies with
regard to similarities in the implicit definitions of paternal involvement. One can distinguish three components
of parental involvement:
1. Engagement = involves time spent in actual one-on-one interaction with the child
2. Accessibility = characterized by less intense degrees of interaction. It includes child-related housework
or time spent sitting in one room while the child plays in the next room
3. Responsibility = the extent to which the parent takes ultimate responsibility for the child’s welfare and
care. It involves making child-care and baby-sitting arrangements, ensuring that the child has clothes
to wear, and making arrangements for care and nurturance. Much of the time involved is not spent in
direct interaction with the child, and thus survey researchers can easily overlook this type of
involvement.
,How have researchers compared levels of paternal involvement?: extent of paternal involvement
As for the involvement of fathers in two-parent families in which mothers are not employed, fathers spend
about 20% to 25% as much time as mothers do in direct interaction or engagement with their children, and
about a third as much time being accessible to their children. The largest discrepancy between paternal and
maternal involvement was in the area of responsibility. Many studies indicated that fathers assumed essentially
no responsibility for their children’s care or rearing.
In two-parent families with employed mothers, the levels of paternal compared with maternal
engagement and accessibility are both substantially higher, namely, for direct interaction and accessibility
averaging 33% and 65% respectively, whereas Pleck’s later review reported that the averages had increased to
44% and 66%. As far as responsibility is concerned, however, there was initially no evidence that maternal
employment had a major effect on the level of paternal involvement. In light of the controversies of this score,
it is worth noting that, on average, fathers do not appear to spend more time interacting with their children
when mothers are employed. Instead, the proportions appear to increase because mothers are doing less.
Thus, fathers are proportionately more involved when mothers are employed, even though the depth of their
involvement, in absolute terms, remains essentially unchanged.
Child and family characteristics have much less affect on paternal involvement than one might expect.
Both parents spend more time with their children when the children are younger. Although fathers may know
more about, feel more comfortable and competent with, and appear more interested in older children, they
apparently do not spend more time with them. This may be because older children no longer want to interact
with parents as much. Popular presumptions are correct, however, so far as the effects of the child’s gender
are concerned. Fathers are indeed more interested in and more involved with their sons than their daughters,
regardless of the children’s ages. However, beyond these variations associated with age and gender, there are
no consistent regional, ethnic, or religious variations in the amount of time that parents spend with their
children.
How have researchers compared levels of paternal involvement?: changes over time
Few data are available concerning changes over time in levels of paternal involvement. Some relevant data
were reported by Juster (1985), who compared figures from a 1975 national survey with figures obtained in a
follow-up survey in 1981. In 1981 the average father spent much more time (26% more) in the most intensive
type of child care (direct interaction) than in 1975. The percentage increase for mothers was substantially
smaller (7%), at least in part because the changes for mothers took place relative to higher baseline levels. In
any event, the discrepancy between the levels of maternal and paternal involvement remained large. In both
1976 and 1981, paternal involvement was about one-third that of mothers, rising from 29% in 1976 to 34% in
1981.
Pleck (1997) examined and compared the data on father involvement obtained from studies
conducted between the mid-1970s and early 1980s and those conducted in the later 1980s and early 1990s. He
concluded that the average levels of father involvement had increased. The average father spent one-third as
much time as the average mother in direct interaction in the late 1970s, whereas that figure had increased to
43% by the early ’90s. Likewise, whereas the average father was accessible to his children about half as much
time as the average mother in the earlier surveys, this figure has increased to almost two-thirds as much time
by the early 1990s.
Although these statistics all suggest continuing increases in the average level of paternal involvement
over time, it is important to avoid over-interpretation of the findings. First, these studies have focused primarily
on the amount of time that fathers spend with their children rather than on the content and quality of the
interaction. Second, they focus primarily on the children in two-parent families who obviously represent only a
portion–a declining portion–of the total number of children in the country.
Behavioural and motivational differences between mothers and fathers:
Researchers have criticized the time-use studies on the grounds that they examine how much time parents
spend with their children, while ignoring possible variations in the content of their interactions. Mothers’
interactions with their children are dominated by caretaking, whereas fathers are behaviorally defined as
playmates. Mothers actually play with their children much more than fathers, but as a proportion of the total
amount of child-parent interaction, play is a much more prominent component of father-child interaction.
Although mothers are associated with caretaking and fathers with play, we cannot assume that fathers
, are less capable of child care. Studies show that, during the newborn period, there are no differences in
competence between mothers and fathers. Contrary to the notion of a maternal instinct, parenting skills are
usually acquired ‘‘on the job’’ by both mothers and fathers. However, mothers are ‘‘on the job’’ more than
fathers, and thus become more sensitive to their children, more in tune with them, and more aware of each
child’s characteristics and needs. By virtue of their lack of experience, fathers become correspondingly less
sensitive and come to feel less confidence in their parenting abilities. Fathers thus continue to defer to and
cede responsibility to mothers, whereas mothers increasingly assume responsibility.
Behavioural and motivational differences between mothers and fathers: motivation
Obviously, different conceptions or definitions of fatherhood are associated with different sets of motivations.
Conceptions of fatherhood, as well as the extent to which individual fathers are motivated to behave
accordingly, appear to be determined by the men’s socio-cultural background, current social circumstances,
and their earlier experiences, particularly the behavior of their own parents. Therefore, it may be more
productive to enumerate the most important motivational or explanatory categories that have been
hypothesized.
Sociobiologists emphasize that both men and women strive to maximize the representation of their
genes in future generations. However, the ‘‘down side’’ is that men can never really be sure of paternity, and
thus always face the risk of investing resources in someone else’s children (genes). Several predictions flow
from these simple (if controversial) observations:
1. Men invest less in individual offspring because the costs of not investing are so much lower and the risks of
mis-investment are so much higher than they are for women.
2. Men support their partners and offspring economically and socially (rather than physiologically).
3. Biologically determined differences in male and female investment may continue after delivery.
4. Like mothers, fathers invest time in the care and rearing of their children in order to bring children to
reproductive maturity. Unlike mothers, their behavior does not appear to be hormonally facilitated.
5. The more men invest in partners and their children, the more they want to be sure of paternity; the extent
to which they provide economic and socio-emotional support may affect the extent to which their partners’
later children have the same fathers.
6. The fewer the children, the greater the motivation to invest time and resources in the success of each.
Fortunately, the desire to be a father is not driven solely by the desire to propagate one’s genes, and
sociobiological explanations in terms of ultimate causes involve a different level of analysis than psychological
and sociological explanations.
Being a father denotes maturity and confers status in many societies and subcultures, while
participation in shaping the growth and development of another person brings fulfillment to many men and
women. Social status attaches to those whose partners and children are well-provisioned and successful.
Attitude surveys indicate the relative, if not absolute importance of these motivations, as well as differing
perceptions of the ways in which these desired outcomes can best be hastened. The type and extent of
individual involvement in fathering may also be affected by recollections of the fathering experienced by men
as children. Some men, particularly those who embrace hands-on involvement and avoid being defined solely
as breadwinners, are motivated to emulate the behavior of their fathers. In contrast other men who behave in
this way are apparently driven by a desire to be better fathers than were their own fathers. Finally, studies
have shown that the amount of time fathers spend with, and the amount of responsibility fathers assume for
their children is associated with several factors, such as socioeconomic class membership (lower class fathers
tend to spend more time with their children), child’s age (fathers spend more time with younger than with
older children), child’s gender (fathers spend more time with boys than with girls), and maternal employment
status (fathers assume more responsibility when their partners are employed)
Modes of paternal influence:
When we recognize the diverse roles that fathers are expected to play in different families and communities, it
becomes apparent that we must recognize the variety of ways in which fathers can influence their children’s
development. Clearly, breadwinning remains a key component of the father’s role in most segments of society
today. Economic support of the family constitutes an indirect but important way in which fathers contribute to
the rearing and emotional health of their children. A second important but indirect source of influence stems
